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Often I hear a drooling political prostitute use the vernacular of science for moron-baiting purposes. Among the techno-babble words recently acquired by the anti-intelligentsia is “optics.”

The book on optics (Opticks, as he wrote it) was written by Newton himself. Optics is the science of light. “The way morons will see it, if properly guided by my propaganda” is not functionally equivalent. Is it that the words “perception” and “appearance” have too many syllables? Optics is a fairly narrow area of study. I mean that it is very specific, though many would argue that its vast and growing set of applications shouldn’t be called narrow. Screw those guys. Within the field, the word “optics,” when not applied to the field itself, generally refers to items such as filters, lenses, and mirrors. In what way is this similar to “appearance?”

But I guess it sounds educated to the sorts of people that prefer the airheads who deliver their daily dose of bovine excreta to sound smart.

It beats having to listen to actual smart people who will almost certainly disagree with their preferred delusions, I suppose.

I have been a bit of an amateur linguist since high school. Recently, I decided to look into which languages were the most spoken. I made a post on that, based on minimal intertube research. Now that I have a new table plugin (courtesy of Tobias Bäthge), I decided to take another stab at it. This time, I spent a couple of hours on Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook. I included countries whose contributions were over 10,000,000 speakers. For some languages, however, this wasn’t enough. So I also included either the first two countries or the first three if the third was a significant contributor).

Language

Country

Speakers

Chinese - Mandarin

All Countries

1100000000

China

940000000

Taiwan

23071779

Singapore

1659258

English

All Countries

900000000

United States

267444149

India

125226449

Philippines

89800000

Nigeria

79000000

United Kingdom

59600000

Germany

46272504

Canada

25246220

France

23000000

Pakistan

18000000

Australia

17357833

Italy

17000000

The Netherlands

14000000

South Africa

13673203

Spain

12500000

Turkey

12000000

Poland

11000000

China

10000000

Hindi

All Countries

510000000

India

487560891

Pakistan

14987418

Spanish

All Countries

450000000

Mexico

110651490

United States

50000000

Spain

46624207

Colombia

45931584

Argentina

40655093

Venezuela

29133156

Peru

26097668

Chile

17280812

Ecuador

14034186

Guatemala

12712691

Cuba

11168448

Dominican Rebublic

10184100

Arabic

All Countries

350000000

Egypt

80117000

Sudan

43939598

Algeria

34895000

Morocco

31649000

Iraq

30747000

Saudi Arabia

25721000

Yemen

23580000

Syria

21906000

Tunisia

10327800

Russian

All Countries

280000000

Russia

138739892

Kazakhstan

14746254

Ukraine

10832330

Belarus

6014703

Bengali

All Countries

260000000

Bangladesh

155399124

India

96323005

Portuguese

All Countries

240000000

Brazil

190755799

Mozambique

20366795

Angola

15116000

Portugal

10555853

French

All Countries

180000000

France

60578600

Democratic Republic of the Congo

24320000

Algeria

21000000

Cote d'Ivoire

12740000

Morocco

10131001

Canada

9590700

German

All Countries

128000000

Germany

81471834

Austria

7280510

Switzerland

4965975

Tai-Kadai

All Countries

84000000

Thailand

66720153

Laos

6477211

.

Unfortunately, the “All Countries” number is only a rough estimate. Someday I may be induced to do an actual study. For now, however, I think this is adequate for informational purposes.